"Appeal to credibility"? Are we just making up fallacies based on a formula now?
Yes, given two alternatives, one should prefer the one that is more credible in light of the available information. That certainly doesn't mean that the more credible of the two is incontrovertible, but it does take more than armchair skepticism to controvert it.
Skepticism is about paying attention to all of the evidence that has been presented. Coming up with cute phrases to justify offhandedly dismissing information that you don't like falls more into the realm of pseudoskepticism.
Not only are good frontend engineers rare, but I've also noticed that it seems to be common for the best ones to migrate out of frontend work. They get tired of spending all day fighting with colleagues who have coding skills but not design acumen, and the same traits that make them a good frontend engineer also make it very easy to transition to a role that comes with a less psychologically costly work environment.
One important difference in all of those is that they are decisions made by the user of the programming language, not the author.
Sub-optimal performance decisions made by the user are their own business (and, perhaps, their customers'), and not really the language authors' concern. The converse is not true. Sub-optimal performance decisions made by the language authors end up affecting everybody.
I agree that saying a 1% difference would disqualify it as a systems language is hyperbolic. I disagree with the assertion that it's not a big deal. Having a core development team that considers 1% to be a big deal is a very desirable trait in a systems language. Achieving very high performance goals often comes through an accretion of many such 1% (and sub-1%) decisions.
It's not just him. At least at the time I was doing it, it was a lot of people in the program. Maybe even half.
At the time, it annoyed me to no end. Not so much anymore. Programming is a well-paid profession with relatively few barriers to entry. The degree is (usually) one of them. Treating it as just another thing you need to get past in order to get to a good career is fine. Good even. Probably saner than my younger self's "I love this and it will consume my entire life for at least a decade" approach to the subject.
The older me kind of wants to have more people like this on my team. There's a certain ruthless logic and economy of effort here that really earns my respect. It might help counterbalance the tendency to get carried away and over-engineer things that many of us "CS is my life's calling" people tend to exhibit.
Yup. I'm one of those folks who thinks that RAS syndrome is an entertaining and occasionally useful language quirk, and not at all a problem.
For example, even within a computing context, saying "Fish shell" just might help someone understand that you're talking about the Unix shell and not the cipher, and would always help someone who's not familiar with Fish to at least understand that you're talking about an alternative Unix shell.
By contrast, whenever someone posts a Hacker News article about ML, the first comment is invariably someone complaining that they thought it would be about machine learning, and this is unnecessarily confusing, and a borderline injustice, it should change its name, etc. It would probably be easier for everyone involved if it were idiomatic to say "ML language", even thought doing so would be redundant.
GNU Operating System -> GNU's Not Unix Operating System
Fish Shell -> Friendly Interactive Shell Shell
One expands to include the original acronym, but doesn't duplicate the descriptive extra words. The other doesn't expand to include the original acronym, but does duplicate the descriptive extra word.
In other words, one is recursive but not redundant, the other is redundant but not recursive.
> Rust, you have to name an interface, but you can’t actually create new instances of the concrete type returned by the function.
I think that's the distinction that really matters. The thing that's neat about Voldemort types, and gives them their interesting properties that are distinct from anonymous types, is that they have no name at all. Not even an interface or trait name.
If you have a publicly visible interface, that's a name. It may be a name of a base type but it's still a name. IIRC, you can't even typeof() an instance of a Voldemort type.
That has some implications for how Voldemort types work that can't be replicated with anonymous interface implementations. The main one is, Voldemort types are very thoroughly sealed. There is no way to create an instance of one outside of the function where it's defined. With an interface, anyone else could come along and create their own implementation.
The market for programming languages has been saturated at least since I got into programming. Which was not all that recently.
The market for music has been saturated for even longer. But nobody really complains when someone wants to start a band, because we recognize that creative work has intrinsic value, even when it produces little economic return, even if only by enriching the life of its producer. Experimenting with programming languages is only very superficially different from that.
I've only got young kids, so I have only experienced tired and frustrated. But even our bad days only last a day, tops. What I haven't experienced, but do observe in colleagues with teenagers, is utter despondency and emotional collapse due to a cloud of rancor that's been hanging over the family for weeks on end.
Single-income family that sent a kid to all-day pre-k reporting in. We offered our kid the choice, and they enthusiastically opted for the all-day option.
I don't think it was really a hard choice, from their perspective. "Do you want to spend 3 hours having fun with friends every day, or 6 hours?" That's right up there with, "Would you rather have one cookie or two cookies?"
I agree that there needs to be a more evidence-based approach. Though, I don't quite follow you on the specific example. The scientific consensus that I'm familiar with (based on trying to figure out, a couple years ago, how best to support a young child who was very eager to learn to read) is that you get the best outcomes when you use both approaches, and the current thinking is that no reading instruction program that is based on just phonics or just whole word can be considered a complete reading instruction program.
I don't want to say Americans don't love and cherish their children. But the uncomfortable truth is that our culture has become so materialist that, on a mass scale, when we look at our children, we don't really see the people they are now. We see the economic participants they will be in 15 years.
If, by "a little time", you mean a few years, until they're psychologically developed enough that you can expect this of them.
"The way we need them to learn" strikes me as a very telling choice of words. This is a moment where we need to be meeting their needs, not just molding them to our expectations.
The important things that kids are learning at these ages are the psychosocial things - how to wait your turn, how to resolve conflicts, how to share, etc. None of this, I'm guessing, can be replicated in online learning, anyway. And my understanding is that that stuff is best learned at specific developmental periods. We just have to do our best to make sure our kids are getting it outside of school.
I'm not nearly as worried about the 3 R's. I just don't expect that we'll find there's much long term difference between kids who are taught to read in 1st and second grade, and kids who are taught to read in kindergarten and 1st grade.
Yes, given two alternatives, one should prefer the one that is more credible in light of the available information. That certainly doesn't mean that the more credible of the two is incontrovertible, but it does take more than armchair skepticism to controvert it.
Skepticism is about paying attention to all of the evidence that has been presented. Coming up with cute phrases to justify offhandedly dismissing information that you don't like falls more into the realm of pseudoskepticism.